Author: Takun

  • ReX v0.0.1 is here!

    ReX v0.0.1 is here!

    ReX is finally here! There’s no need for a long intro here, you all have waited long enough so let’s dive right into it.

    Built-in Terrain3D

    Editing terrain is a big part of developing 3D games, and it should be an out-of-the-box feature for any 3D game engine. ReX integrates Terrain3D directly into the engine, allowing game devs to edit terrain right out the gate. No addons or extensions required.

    Performance enhancements

    While there were tons of changes under the hood made to improve performance, here’s some of the highlights:

    • Updated to C++23 and integrated up to AVX2 support
    • Caching changes to reduce runtime overhead and improve performance (especially in rendering)
    • OOM changes that improved stability
    • Other stability changes (crash prevention, null pointer checks, logic corrections, de/serialization fixes, improper binding fixes, etc.)
    • A huge amount of changes that culminated in significant frame-rate increases when utilizing CPU, pathfinding, etc.

    But what does this actually look like when running a game?

    Below is a scene of a survivors type game that one of our testers made, running in Godot 4.5.1 and ReX.

    With 150 enemies, the scene is running at 144fps in Godot 4.5.1. That same scene with the same enemy count runs at 240fps in ReX. That’s a pretty noticeable difference.

    Where to download ReX

    If you’re curious to see how ReX handles your projects, you can go over to the download page and test it for yourself.

    Just remember to back up your projects before opening them in ReX.

    ReX changes coming to Redot LTS

    In case you missed our last blogpost,the changes from ReX will be making their way to Redot LTS. ReX’s spiritual successor, Draconic, will be a brand new engine built from the ground up to fulfill the original vision that our team had for ReX.

    We’d like to thank you all for your patience, especially after this recent delay. The team found a bug in our final round of testing last week and wanted to get that fixed before giving you all an official release. We hope you enjoy ReX, and are looking forward to the enhancements it will bring to Redot LTS.

    Want to contribute?

    If you’d like to help contribute to Redot LTS or Draconic, or would like an internship at Redot Foundation, send an email to [email protected]

    If you’d like to help support development, you can go to redotfoundation.org and make a donation. Redot LTS and Draconic are FOSS projects made by passionate devs in their free time, and every donation helps!

  • ReX release date, Draconic Engine, and the future of ReX

    ReX release date, Draconic Engine, and the future of ReX

    After months of development, a few blog post updates and teasers, and a whole lot of, “ReX soon™” memes, we can finally say that ReX v0.0.1 will be releasing this Friday!

    For those that don’t know, ReX Engine is a hard fork of Godot 4.5.1, where we don’t have any restrictions on what we can change with the engine. Unlike Redot LTS, ReX can have changes that break compatibility with projects made in Godot 4.5. This allowed the team to really dig into the engine and make optimizations and adjustments that had the potential to greatly improve the performance.

    The picture on the left shows a survivors-like game running in Godot 4.5.1, and the picture on the right shows the same game running in ReX, with a difference of 86 FPS between the two. In this particular case, it’s the difference between a game being playable vs unplayable.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean that every project will see the same performance boost in ReX, especially since many of the optimizations were for CPU workloads, but overall our testers have found ReX to be a more performant and stable experience.

    ReX development

    The end goal of ReX was for it to be a complete rewrite that would one day become it’s own engine and be capable of creating AAA games like Unity and Unreal. The ReX devs strongly believe that there should be a FOSS alternative for these engines that provides the performance and features that you would expect from a modern game engine, while also providing game devs complete and total control over the products they make.

    Up until now, the ReX team was going about this through a Ship of Theseus method, where they would rewrite the engine one section at a time until they reached that complete rewrite goal. Throughout this process, the team realized that it’s not a feasible approach. Everything in Godot is connected to several other things, so when trying to adjust one part of the engine, you’d actually have to update many things at the same time. The ReX devs did a great job at this, but the process was much slower than we would like.

    Since the end goal was a total rewrite and a completely new engine, the team decided that the quickest and most efficient way of doing this was to build a new engine from the ground up.

    Enter Draconic Engine

    Draconic Engine is a brand new engine that will be built from scratch by the ReX team. While we can’t share too many details, Draconic Engine will use:

    • ECS
    • C# for high level operations and the front end
    • C++ for low level back end math and heavy loops
    • BGFX renderer
    • Jolt physics
    • Avalonia for UI
    • C# as the primary scripting language

    Draconic Engine will be a 2D and 3D game engine with modern tools, performance, and features, and an intuitive UI. Our devs plan on making Draconic the go-to FOSS game engine, so stay tuned for more Draconic Engine updates as they come out!

    The future of ReX

    With Draconic Engine being the spiritual successor to ReX, you might be wondering what this means for the ReX engine.

    The changes and progress that ReX has made will be absorbed into Redot LTS over the next few versions, and Redot LTS will carry the torch as far as ReX-like changes go. The ReX devs have done incredible work, and we won’t let that go to waste. You can look at the ReX release as a preview of what’s to come in Redot LTS.

    As always, we’d like to thank you all for sticking around and supporting Redot, ReX and now Draconic. If you’d like to help out with development, you can reach out on Discord in the volunteer-apps channel, or donate to the Redot Foundation.

    Header art by FlashfyreDev